Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Power generation systems may convert chemical and/or mechanical energy (e.g., kinetic energy) to electrical energy for various applications, such as utility systems. As one example, a wind energy system may convert kinetic wind energy to electrical energy. Wind energy systems may use turbines that have a rotor coupled to a generator. Incident wind turns the rotor, which rotates a shaft, and the generator can then use the motion of the shaft to generate electricity by moving one or more windings and/or magnets with respect to one another to induce oscillations in the magnetic flux through one of the windings, which creates an oscillating voltage across the winding.
Electrical power transmission and distribution systems distribute electrical energy using networks of conductive lines. Generally, electrical energy is conveyed from energy generation stations, to energy consumers. To efficiently convey electrical energy over the network, such networks generally carry high voltage, alternating current (AC) electrical signals. Because the power transmitted over a conductive line generally scales with the product of current and voltage, and the power dissipated in the conductive line generally scales with the current squared. Thus, for a given transmission power, increasing the voltage by a factor of 10 allows for decreasing the current by a factor of 10, which reduce the dissipated power by a factor of 100.
In addition, AC transmission lines allow for scaling the voltage level at various substations using transformers. A transformer has inductively coupled coils wrapped around a common magnetic core, with ends of each coil providing leads for an input signal and an output signal, respectively. Due to the relationship between magnetic flux and induced electromotive force in the inductively coupled coils, an AC voltage applied to one coil (e.g., using the input leads) generates a varying magnetic flux through the core and the other coil, which then results in a voltage across the leads of the other coil in proportion to the magnetic flux. Because the magnetic flux through each coil is proportionate to the number of windings of each around the common magnetic core, scaling the number of windings of each coil allows for scaling the AC voltage of the input relative to the output. Thus, using AC voltage, electrical energy can be conveniently transmitted over long distances at high voltage, then scaled (“stepped down”) to lower voltages at various distribution points using transformers.